Hotmail: Your password was too long, so we fixed it for you

Earlier this year, about 6.5 million LinkedIn account password hashes were published on a hackers� forum. The hashes were simple SHA1 digests computed from the user�s passwords, as stored into the LinkedIn backend infrastructure.

It didn�t take long for hackers to start cracking them, with over half of them cracked in almost no time.

There are two main reasons why such fast cracking was possible:

* the usage of the SHA1 function itself * fast GPUs

Let�s take a look look at both.

64 bit nod32 esed nod32 4 nod32 esed nod32